Hello from the Corn State!
Sorry about not posting last night but don’t worry because we are all alive and well…except for Art. He is in the hospital due to a horrible Mattock axe accident. I’m kidding. We are all great though and here’s what we’ve been up to:
TUESDAY
We started out the day at the same house on Normandy St. that we worked at on Monday. We just finished up the work there with some nail removal and tree stump exterminating. After about 2 hours there we moved onto another house on the same street. There we did a bunch of lawn beautification. This entails more tree removal, pruning, serious garden cleaning and sand bag relocating. Denise and a local volunteer, Dale, were out mowing lawns. Tall grasses watch out because Denise is equipped and prepared to trim you down to 2 inches! At the end of the day we were all tired but it was worth it to see the work that we had done. The yard was looking much better and it was a huge sense of accomplishment. After that we all showered up and got ready to go to dinner. On our way to dinner we dropped off our laundry. Apparently some people on this trip aren’t comfortable with wearing the same dirty, muddy, smelly clothes every day to work in. I don’t get it. Well we ate at the famous Hamburg Inn which has award winning burgers. This restaurant has been featured in movies and has been visited by a few presidents. We came to understand why as the burgers were delicious! Following dinner we picked up our laundry and went to our local trip organizer’s house for compline and then broke into two groups. One that went home and one that went to get ice cream at Whitey’s, an Iowa City unique place. The ice cream group was primarily the 3 boys and Denise. We ate ice cream, walked around the city, and then returned home for bed.
WEDNESDAY
On this beautiful morning we were planning on working with Habitat for Humanity. That didn’t work out and it appears as if we won’t be working with them this week. We instead returned to good ol’ Normandy St. to help the people there. Today we moved onto two new homes. One home belonged to a great guy named Frank. His story is that he was 2 weeks away from moving into this house that he had just bought and fully upgraded with brand new appliances. The flood came and ruined all of that. Now he is just trying to finish up the house quickly so that he can move his sick wife into their home they’ve never slept in. It felt good to help him with the painting and other help that he needed. The other group moved onto another home right next door. There we were removing stumps (never a lack of dead trees to be removed), pruning back trees, and bagging toxic mulch. We knew it was toxic because an hour after touching it, Perry grew a 3rd arm. She’s going to be even more efficient now in the St. Anne’s office. We returned home after work to shower and get ready to go out. Some of us went to go get groceries, dinner and to check out the artisans gallery. I hear that the gallery was a really neat place. The second group, the 3 boys, went out to explore the University of Iowa campus. We all returned for excellent feast of a dinner and for compline. Compline seems to be growing in popularity as our group keeps growing with other parishioners wanting to join in.
Again we are all doing great and God’s presence can really be felt in this group. Especially as all of the relationships that we are making within the group and outside of the group are growing. We all feel truly blessed to be here while missing our loved ones at home. We are all excited for the next days of our grand adventure!
- Varun
Tim reports on Sat. evening: We left Reston at 5am today, traveling to BWI and then flying to New Orleans. After a trouble-free journey we arrived at St. Andrews in Carroltown where we are staying in the parish house. We visited the Strickland house that we worked on last year and some folks took a tour of the lower ninth and saw the devastation that still exists there. 
Watch this space for messages from St. Anne's first mission trip of 2009! A team leaves for New Orleans on Saturday, Feb. 28th to work with the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana (EDOLA) in the continuing efforts to reconstruct homes destroyed in the Katrina floods.
